


Walk in the Dark

by pendrecarc



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/M, Irrelevant Gift Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:31:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Time to turn out the lights, Harold</em>.</p><p>Harold has no contingency for this, and he's in no shape for improvisation. Fortunately, he's not alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walk in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [michaelemerhouse](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=michaelemerhouse).



> This was started well before the last two episodes aired, back when we only had the leaked footage of young!Harold to go on, and I'm afraid it's been pretty heavily Jossed since then! Hope you still enjoy it. :)
> 
> Written for [michaelemerhouse](http://michaelemerhouse.tumblr.com/post/66704109629/irrelevant-gift-exchange-wishlist) for the 2013/14 Irrelevant Gift Exchange.

Somewhere nearby, people were shooting at one another.

It was a sound to which Finch had sadly become accustomed, so he didn’t think much of it. The noise was a bit muffled, but that was also to be expected. “Are you all right, Mr. Reese?” he asked. He was only a little worried when the response didn’t come at once. Mr. Reese was busy. He’d check in as soon as he could.

Finch pushed himself upright and swayed a little. His spine radiated a searing pain, which was also familiar; that was likely his own fault, if he’d allowed himself to fall asleep in such an uncomfortable position. Really he must invest in a couch with better lumbar support. And what had happened to the lights? He waited a moment for them to turn back on; when they didn’t, he waited another minute for the emergency generators to kick on instead; and when even that didn’t happen, he put a careful hand out in the general direction of his desk. It wasn’t there.

The guns stopped abruptly. “This is all very disorienting,” he said into the silence. “Mr. Reese, do you suppose you could finish what you’re doing and provide me with some assistance?”

There was still no reply. He knew that ought to be reason for panic, but he found that he couldn’t quite manage it. It occurred to him that the pain ought to be causing him more distress, too. Each thought seemed to float away even as he reached for it.

“Bear,” he called hopefully. When that produced similar results, he sighed and leaned back. His head felt oddly heavy. “All right. I’ll be going back to sleep then.”

“Oh, no you won’t,” said a voice quite close to him. He squinted. How had he not noticed the door opening? And there was light now, but not yet enough to see—

“—Mr. Reese?”

“You _are_ out of it,” said someone he was reasonably sure was not Mr. Reese. “I need you to move, Harold. Can you do that?”

“I’m not entirely certain that’s a good idea.”

There were hands tugging at his waistcoat, ghosting over his arms and shoulders. “Are you injured?”

He shook his head. That definitely hurt, and he had to catch his breath to say, “It’s just the usual.”

“Well, you’ll just have to deal with it.” Mr. Reese would have been more sympathetic. He would also, Finch thought, have been much gentler about getting him upright, but whoever was levering him to his feet was short and strong and very, very businesslike—

“Ms. Shaw,” he said in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“Let’s save it for when we have some privacy.”

He wanted to protest that, because they seemed to be quite alone, but she had an arm under his and was pulling him along beside her. Whatever had been holding the pain at bay didn’t seem to be working any longer. Every step was excruciating. He didn’t mean to cry out, but he did.

“Sorry,” she said, though she didn’t sound particularly apologetic.

He could see better now. They were in a hallway of some sort, long and tiled and lit by fluorescent lights that kept flickering on and off—or maybe he was just having trouble with his vision. Things were certainly very fuzzy. He raised a hand to straighten his glasses. “I’ve dropped them,” he said in alarm.

“Come on.”

“But I’ve left my glasses behind,” he said, straining against her grip. “We need to go back.”

“No time. And you didn’t leave them there, Finch. You left them in New York.”

Back in— He stopped short. Her hands shifted, grabbing hard at him. He would have pushed her away, except that suddenly he seemed to be listing rather hard to one side. Oh, that explained it. She was holding him up. It was remarkably kind of her. He’d been meaning to apologize for the assumptions he’d made about her attitude when she first started working with them, but the timing had never seemed right. Perhaps now—

“ _Harold_. I can’t carry you.”

“Ms. Shaw, I should tell you,” he began, but then just then the shooting started up again. He considered raising his voice, but she didn’t seem to be paying much attention to him anyhow.

They were moving again. He stumbled once or twice, but she was always there to catch him. His neck hurt terribly. At some point he was struck full in the face by a gust of frigid air, and then his feet were dragging along concrete rather than tile. Outside, then. They stopped.

“Get in,” she said, but she didn’t actually give him the opportunity. She opened the door of a small, dark sedan (or was it just night-time?) and shoved him inside.

The window exploded.

“Get _down_ ,” she said, except now she was in the seat next to him, and then he was jerked sideways as the car started moving. “Finch, get—”

“Oh dear,” he said faintly, and then leaned forward to be sick in the footwell.

“Whatever works,” she muttered, and the car rocketed forward to the sound of bullets spraying all around them.

***

An indeterminate amount of time later, she pulled over to the side of the road. “Finch?”

“Ms. Shaw.”

“You sound better.” She leaned over the gearshift and grasped him by the chin, turning him to look at her. “You all there now?”

“More or less. I confess I still don’t remember very much about how I got here. You said we aren’t in New York?”

She was leaning quite close, peering into his eyes, he thought, but he couldn’t see her very well. He wondered if she was checking for a concussion. He didn’t think he’d been injured. He reached for the overhead lamp, but she slapped his arm down. “No lights.”

“But we—” The headlights weren’t on, he noticed belatedly. “Have you been driving in the dark?”

“There’s a full moon. So it’s probably pointless to begin with—I don’t actually know how this works. That’s why you’re here.”

 _How what works?_ he wanted to ask, but his head still wasn’t as clear as he wanted it to be. One thing at the time. “And where is here, exactly?”

“Two hours north of Omaha.”

“Nebraska?”

“Do you know another one?”

He looked outside, blinking, but full moon or no, he couldn’t see anything. He could see the sleek screen of the GPS control in front of them, though. He put a hand out to trace the bullet hole punched right through it. “That was a near miss.”

“I did that.” He wanted to ask why, but she leaned back. “You look like shit. Can you walk?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I guess we’ll find out.” She opened her door and got out.

He sat there in the dark and listened to her walk around to the other side of the car, feet crunching on gravel and—snow? She opened his door. He tried to turn toward her and gasped. His head was much clearer, which was obviously to be preferred, but now there was nothing to dull the pain from his neck and hip.

“What’s wrong?” Her voice was sharp. “Were you hit?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t believe I was. It’s just, as I said, the usual.”

Shaw reached in and got a hand under his arm. “Then we need to move.” He obliged by levering one leg out of the vehicle, then leaning toward her until gravity and her grip did the rest. He wobbled for a moment until he got the other leg beneath him. “Can you walk?” she asked again.

He still couldn’t see her face. “Are you offering me a choice?”

“Not really.”

“Then I suppose I can. Where are we going?”

“Somewhere it can’t find us. Save your breath, Harold. We’ll talk when we can stop again.”

She’d said “it”, not “they”, and he thought this was worthy of interrogation, but she’d already inserted himself under his arm and was pulling him away from the road. He got his feet moving by sheer force of will, and together they stumbled along snow and gravel until it gave way to the softer texture of frosted grass atop frozen clods of earth.

Finch sucked a deep breath of the night air. It smelled of ozone and manure. A familiar smell, but not one that had been part of his daily landscape for years, and that more than anything she’d said to him brought it home that he was not in New York, that he’d been plucked off the street and kept in the dark while his world was run right off its tracks. Mr. Reese was—somewhere else, and something had happened to turn Ms. Shaw’s ordinary caution into something even he was willing to call paranoia.

His head continued to clear as they walked. His hip and neck got no better, but he fell into a sort of rhythm with the pain. A step on his left foot, a stab up from his hip; a step on his right, and pressure like a vice all around the base of his neck. He let his eyes fall closed. It wasn’t as though he could see anything, after all.

“Clouds are coming in,” Shaw in his ear. “That’s good news.”

“Is it?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I was hoping you could tell me. How much do you remember?”

“Very little.” He remembered checking in with Ms. Shaw and Mr. Reese to arrange a rendezvous; he had to hand over the memory stick he’d recovered with certain sensitive documents of importance to their latest number. He’d arrived early, and then his phone had rung with an unknown caller.

He’d recognized the voice at the other end, though. _Time to turn out the lights, Harold_ , Root had said. It was the first he’d heard from her in days, after she’d disappeared from the library without a trace. _I’ll see you in the morning._ She’d hung up before he could ask her what she meant, and then he’d turned around to find Agent Hersh at his elbow.

“How long has it been?”

“I said save your breath. We can talk later.”

“Ms. Shaw, I’m extremely disoriented and would appreciate—”

“You up and disappeared on us thirty-nine hours ago.”

“And where is Mr. Reese?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is—”

“He was fine when I saw him last, apart from wanting to take on the NSA and ISA singlehanded. I talked him out of it.”

Finch would have given a great deal to overhear that conversation. “How were you separated?”

She didn’t answer. He was shivering by then. He wondered what had happened to his coat.

They reached the top of a gentle rise, and she said, “There’s a farm up ahead. I need you to make it another half mile, and then you can rest.”

“Do you plan to ring the doorbell?”

She planned, as it turned out, to break into a barn so they could sleep in the hayloft. “I don’t think I can manage it,” he said as they stood at the foot of a not-so-terribly-steady ladder. “What time is it?”

“Just after two.”

“Then we only have a few hours in any case. Farmers are early risers.”

“You’re not going to make it much farther.”

She’d judged it safe to turn a light on, and he stared down at his fouled trouser legs in the harsh glare. “That’s true enough. Do you suppose we can steal a change of clothing? And perhaps a pair of boots.”

Ms. Shaw looked at him, then gave a jerk of her head. “Sit down. I’ll be back.”

Finch leaned back against the side of the barn and let his legs fold slowly under him. He was feeling faintly dizzy. Low blood sugar, perhaps, combined with the lingering effects of whatever they’d used to drug him. Something hot to eat, he thought, and some tea—and a shower and shave, while he was at it, he smelled of stale sweat and vomit—and then he’d be able to keep moving. Unfortunately, none of that seemed to be forthcoming.

The barn was warm, though. He could hear the shuffling and low, curious noise of the horses, could smell the hay and (not unpleasantly) the manure, all with a sharp undertone of ammonia. Strange, how comforting smells like that could be.

“Food or clothes first?” Ms. Shaw asked. Finch forced his eyes open. She was a dark blur above him, and her arms were full.

“Is there anything to drink?”

Something fell into his lap. Investigation revealed it to be a bottle of cherry soda.

“Is this really—”

“There’s diet, if you’re watching your figure, but I think you could use the sugar.”

He fumbled with the lid. Shaw sighed, then crouched down beside him. “Thank you,” he said as she twisted it off, and then she surprised him by lifting it to his lips. “I think I can—”

“You’ll just spill it,” she said, so he swallowed obediently. It was a little colder than room temperature, much too sweet, and the acid burned his throat. She took it away while he was still thirsty. “Give it a second, see if you keep it down.”

He did, and a minute later she let him have a little more. When it came time to peel off his waistcoat, he found to his embarrassment that he couldn’t manage that, either. She pushed his hands out of the way and went to work. The tie came off with a few quick tugs, and then she reached for the buttons at his neck.

He drew breath to protest, but she cut in before he got a word out. “You’ve been wearing this for two days straight, Harold. If you don’t let me take care of it, you’re going to start complaining about it soon.” He subsided and gave in to the odd sensation of being undressed like a child. He’d endured this sort of assistance immediately following his spinal surgery, and he remembered now the hours he’d spent under the occupational therapist’s direction, learning all over again the simple tasks of daily life.

It was not a happy memory, and there was more bite in his voice than he intended when he said, “That will do, Ms. Shaw.”

She stopped short of peeling him out of the undershirt, though he noted distantly that it had left the pristine white of the cleaners’ far behind. She threaded his arms into a too-large flannel shirt. Its cuffs flopped down over his fingers.

Strange, the connections one’s mind made at times like these. “Now do you suppose we can discuss what’s happened to Mr. Reese?”

She’d produced another flannel shirt and was getting him into that, too. She took a moment before responding. “We got to the rendezvous and you weren’t there. At first we thought you were running late, but Reese spotted your glasses under the fire escape.”

She presented the rest of the story in clear, precise terms, just as though she were delivering a case report. He found it helpful, the matter-of-fact recital of events giving him something straightforward to focus on.

They had set about finding him at once, a conveniently-placed security camera from a nearby bodega delivering the unfortunate news that his disappearance was unrelated to their number. Agent Hersh had looked directly and deliberately into that camera, in fact, before ushering him at gunpoint into a marked vehicle.

And then the trail had gone cold. “ISA’s good at hiding,” Shaw said.

“So how did you—”

“How do you think?”

He’d thought at first that flat tone was impenetrable, but since they’d begun working together he’d catalogued some of its slight variations. This particular version meant extreme displeasure. “Ah. But Ms. Groves walked out last week.” And hadn’t been seen or heard of since, until that cryptic phone call.

“Apparently she stopped back in while we were busy,” Shaw said, abandoning the recitation in favor of sarcasm. “You should really think about finding a new batcave. Somewhere she _hasn’t_ spent quality time. She got back in and left us a nice little welcome note on the door of her cage.”

“What did it say?”

“It was a Greyhound ticket to Norfolk, Nebraska.”

“Just the one?”

“You can imagine the fun we had deciding who’d follow up _that_ lead,” she said. “I got the short straw. Figured I’d find something interesting in Nebraska, but honestly I didn’t think it’d be you. Reese is checking in with some old contacts in DC. Risky, but he thought it might pan out. And before you ask again, he was uninjured and heavily armed when we split up.”

“But you haven’t heard from him since then?”

“We thought it was better to drop all contact.”

“Why on earth—”

“The ticket wasn’t all Root left us.” She handed him a small, square device that felt very much like—

“Watch it!” she said, snatching it away.

“I assure you, Ms. Shaw, I’ve no desire to _tase_ myself.”

“That’s not what it does. I just don’t want you frying the lights.” She turned it over in her hands. “It’s a handheld EMP. Looks like Root’s branching out.”

“Ingenious,” he said, craning forward. She held it just out of reach. “That’s a marvel of engineering, if it does what you suggest. What’s the range?”

“Six to ten feet, I think. I haven’t really had time to conduct tests. It worked all right to get you out of that place, though.”

“A bus ticket and an EMP,” he said, leaning back against the wall. “Do you suppose—”

“Bus travel’s slow and not exactly enjoyable, but it does have some advantages over rail or air.”

“Anonymity. And relative lack of surveillance.”

“Now he gets it,” Shaw said. “Took us longer to pick up on what it meant.”

“I had a head start, though. Ms. Groves called me just before I was—taken into custody.”

“What’d she say?”

“ ‘Time to turn out the lights, Harold,’ “ he repeated. “ ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ Which I have taken to be figurative, as I did not, in fact, see her the next day.”

“Well, fuck,” Shaw said. “I’ve been hoping we got it wrong.”

“I’m very much afraid you didn’t,” Finch replied. The pain and cold had leeched out of him, replaced by a bone-deep weariness. “I believe she’s instructing us to hide from the Machine.”

***

He was startled out of a doze by Shaw appearing above him once again, cutting out the light. “What time is it?” he asked. It came out intelligibly on the first try, which he took as a sign of progress.

“Four-fifteen.”

“They’ll be up soon.”

“I’m gonna need some direction here, Harold.” She sounded calm, much as she generally did when things had gone dangerously wrong.

“I’m trying and failing to remember the last time I heard you admit that.” He was still sluggish, still off his balance, not to mention desperately worried about Mr. Reese; he wasn’t ready to make decisions.

Shaw crossed her arms over her chest. “When I worked for the ISA, we had a protocol called Contingency One. No cell phones or other networked devices, no radio communication, avoid cameras at all costs. I didn’t know about the Machine then, but the idea was pretty clear—Contingency One was what we did if our own surveillance was turned against us. Except it was just a short-term protocol.”

“What were you supposed to do if the situation didn’t resolve quickly?”

“Acknowledge that we were all completely fucked. If it continued beyond a couple of days, I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t have been enough of them left to care whether we gave ourselves up or found some cabin in the north woods to hide in for the rest of our sorry lives. And that, Harold, is why I’m asking you what to do. I can get us out of here. I can get us somewhere safe. I just don’t know whether I _should_. Or even what being safe means right now.”

He closed his eyes. “So we’ve elected to take Ms. Groves’ warning in good faith.”

“I’m not exactly thrilled about it myself, but I don’t know what else we’re supposed to do, Harold. So, again - do I get us out of here?”

He was so very tired. “Yes.”

She didn’t pause to acknowledge it. He appreciated the clarity of purpose. “I’ve got ready access to a couple of tractors, a Buick that’s being held together with rust and duct tape, a pickup the size of an elephant, and something that looks like a paddleboat on wheels.”

“That’s a hay combine.”

“Whatever.”

“Did the Buick have a full gas tank?”

“Nearly.”

“We’ll take that.”

“Where to?”

“South,” he said, “and east. Can you get us onto 133?”

“Yes,” she said, and disappeared.

The car smelled of cows and cigarette smoke, and the passenger’s seat refused to stay upright. Harold lay on the ergonomically-dubious backrest and stared up at the ragged, discolored ceiling.

He waited until Shaw had driven them down the long, gravel-covered driveway and out onto a bumpy country road—the sort that made pinwheel turns every hundred yards, which did absolutely nothing to help with his nausea. Then he said, “Turn off 133 before we get to Omaha. We want to keep to less-traveled roads as much as we can.” She didn’t reply. He took that as permission to continue. “There are a few general principles to keep in mind,” he said. “The first is that the Machine does not actually see everything.”

“Really.” He couldn’t see her face. “After all those impressive speeches I’ve heard, Harold? You’re going to try and tell me you’ve been exaggerating?”

“It was very nearly true in New York. Traffic and security cameras everywhere, more cell phones than people, social networking and digital photos and—”

“I get it.”

“The point is, the Machine only sees what it’s given. It has superhuman intelligence and overwhelming processing power, and its ability to analyze two apparently unrelated data points and draw connections between them gives it something quite close to omniscience. But first it needs the data points. I didn’t create a surveillance system. I created a system to analyze the information from all available surveillance systems.”

“So if the NSA doesn’t have access to something, neither does the Machine.”

“Which, as I said, means it knows nearly everything there is to know in New York. The same goes for most other large centers of population, and camera- and GPS-enabled devices have become so ubiquitous that even smaller towns have a wealth of information ready for harvesting.”

“So we need to stay away from people.”

“When possible.”

“What about satellites?”

“That, I assume, was what you meant by last night’s cryptic reference to cloud cover. The answer is that, yes, some satellites can see through clouds, some satellites can see at night, and though this is not highly publicized I have no doubt that there are surveillance satellites capable of sufficient resolution to identify either of our faces.”

“So we _are_ fucked.”

“Not necessarily.”

“There was some good news in what you just said?”

“The good news is that observation satellites generally have an asynchronous orbit, meaning they can’t be set to monitor a single area of ground indefinitely and that it takes a great deal of delicate planning to focus them on the location you want to observe. Satellites with geosynchronous orbits—satellites that monitor the same location around the clock—are at much higher altitudes and are suited to observing weather patterns and similar large-scale phenomena. They’re useless for surveillance. And, finally, the good news is that the higher-resolution the satellite image, the smaller the area contained in that image.”

“So if anything’s using satellites to track us, it’d need advance warning of where we’ll be.”

“Yes,” he said. The car rose to take a low hill, then dipped. His stomach dropped along with it, then gurgled at him in hollow protest. They really would need to obtain actual sustenance before too long. “Advance warning and the ability to adjust the orbits of the most highly-guarded machinery circling the planet.”

“And you think there’s any chance the Machine can’t do any of that?”

“I certainly never gave it the ability to interfere with satellite programs, but I also never told it to adopt Ms. Groves. I do at least think there’s a chance it didn’t know where I was taken.”

“You’re giving the ISA a lot of credit, there.”

“I don’t think they brought me all the way to Norfolk to enjoy the climate. If I were them, I’d have several unmonitored, undetectable locations spread across the country for use in precisely this sort of situation, wouldn’t you?”

“You think they’re hiding from the Machine, too?”

“I wish I knew. I also wish I knew whether trusting Ms. Groves’ instructions is the right thing to do.”

“She got me to you, didn’t she.” Her voice floated to him through the dark, and this time he could not read her tone at all.

They drove without speaking for a while, and he reflected on the peculiar nature of trust. It was a luxury he’d tried for decades to do without, but it had a way of worming itself back into his life at the most inconvenient of times and in the most unexpected of ways.

“Strange bedfellows,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Do you trust me, Ms. Shaw?”

“Can’t see as I have much choice just now. I was trained to deal with people, not…this.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“So what do we do now? What’s east of Omaha?”

“Iowa.”

“And why are we going to Iowa?”

“To get something to eat, to sleep somewhere safe, and to work out how we can get back in touch with Mr. Reese. But before we do any of those things—”

“What?” she said again.

“To get me a new pair of glasses,” Harold said. He settled down deeper into his seat. “Wake me when we reach the border.”

***

They stopped once at a little 24-hour way station. “There’ll be a security camera,” she warned him. She’d gotten out to pump the gas and rolled the driver’s side window down. The cold air was streaming in, welcome and refreshing after a night of disrupted sleep.

“I give it even odds that it’s operational,” he replied, “and it’s not likely be networked. The card reader will be, though. Do you have cash?”

Naturally she did. She unzipped her jacket to pull a thick wad of twenties out of the inner pocket, and as she did he leaned forward in alarm.

“Ms. Shaw, are you injured?”

She froze for a heartbeat, then pulled the zipper back up. “Thought you couldn’t see anything without those glasses,” she said, just a little too casual.

Trust, indeed. “I have hyperopia.”

She relaxed. “Can’t you just say you’re farsighted like anyone else?”

“That is not the point, Ms. Shaw,” he said severely. “I can see you clearly enough at this distance. Was that blood?”

“Just a graze.”

“You’ve been bleeding since we escaped?” Since _he’d_ escaped, or even more accurately, since she’d rescued him. Yes, apologies were definitely in order.

“I’ve had worse. It needs stitches, but they can wait. How much farther did you say?”

He hadn’t. “Another hour.”

“I’ll be fine.” She turned her back on the car and went in to pay.

The sun had just risen fully when one of the side-roads took a familiar turn. Harold sat up a little straighter, squinting out at the snow-encrusted field that almost certainly housed a rotation of corn and soy these days, given Ohio’s agricultural profile, but if you melted away the snow and raised up a crop of wheat—yes, this was right. Something clenched low in his gut alongside the prickly knot of hunger.

“Turn right at the next fork.”

Shaw’s eyes knifed sideways, narrowing at him for a moment before returning to the road ahead. Whatever she was thinking, she took the turn in silence.

Right at the fork, straight for two miles and across a narrow bridge, left at the stop sign—how odd to discover Lassiter High’s less creative delinquents were still in the habit of scratching rude figures into that pocked red surface. Apparently he _could_ come home again. The more things changed, the more one resorted to cliche in an effort to distract from incipient awkwardness.

A driveway came up on the left. The mailbox outside had been installed recently and was painted a cheerful green, but he didn’t need to see his name—his first one. He could not bring himself to say his _real_ name—stenciled in clear white letters to know they’d arrived.

“This is it.” Shaw pulled over to the other side of the road and put the car in park, though she left the engine running. “I meant—”

“I know what you meant. Where are we?”

“Somewhere safe, as requested.”

She scanned the deserted road behind and ahead of them, then took in the peaceful farmland on either side. “It’s quiet. How do you know it’s safe?”

“Because Lassiter has no traffic cameras, has never come to the particular attention of the NSA or other government bodies, and has some of the worst cellular service in Iowa. Short of that cabin in the woods you suggested earlier, this is as safe as we’re likely to be. Would _you_ look for us here?”

She considered that, gloves curled tight around the steering wheel. “You grew up here.”

For someone who claimed not to relate to ordinary displays of emotion, she was capable of an alarming degree of perception when she chose to employ it. “Yes.”

“And you don’t think it’ll occur to the Machine to check for you at your childhood home?”

“The Machine doesn’t know anything about me prior to 1980.”

“I thought the Machine knew everything.”

“Ms. Shaw, I’ve just finished telling you—“ She raised an eyebrow, and he cut himself off. “Needling me is not a productive use of your time.”

“If you’re right about us being safe here, it’s the most fun I’m gonna get for a while.”

“I wish your idea of ‘fun’ didn’t tend so heavily toward the use of firearms. But to answer what I’ll give you the credit of assuming was an actual question, I went to some lengths to erase any connection between my original identity and the ones I used later.”

“Harold Wren?” She looked at him innocently. Of course she knew by now, though unlike Mr. Reese she’d never been handed the connection to IFT. So how—

“Wren, among others,” he said, determined not to let her unnerve him. “By the time I got around to creating the Machine, there was no trail to be followed. Unless someone takes on the onerous task of digitizing all the Lassiter school district and police records from the 60’s and 70’s, there’s nothing to connect me to this place. Now, if you’re satisfied, perhaps we could go inside?”

“One last thing. You certain of your welcome here?”

She did have a way of cutting to the point. “We won’t be shot.”

“Good enough.” She pulled back onto the road, swung around quickly enough that his shoulder brushed the passenger’s door, and pulled into the drive of his father’s home.

He stepped out onto a patch of ice and nearly lost his balance. Shaw was there in a second, catching him under the arm. He tried to shrug her off, but she dug her fingers into his biceps. “Ms. Shaw, I have no need of assistance.”

“Then why are we here?”

It took him a few moments to come up with a suitable reply, by which time she was already hammering on the front door and there didn’t seem much point. It was enough of a distraction that he didn’t really have to think about what they were doing until the door opened.

He was far enough away to see that the woman standing in the entryway was taller than either of them, broad-shouldered with a sturdy build and steady blue eyes. Or perhaps he was just filling in the blurrier details from memory. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, grey threaded through with very little brown, and her heavily-lined face was creased with friendly confusion. “Who’re you, then?”

He tried for a smile. “Have I changed that much, Annie?”

She’d been looking at Ms. Shaw. Her voice slid up half an octave as she turned to him and said, “Harold?”

“I’m sorry to descend on you like this,” he said after an awkward beat. “May we please come in?”

She stood back from the door and didn’t say anything else until they were all seated at the card table in the living room, hands clutched around mismatched mugs that dated from the seventies. The coffee was bitter, stronger than he remembered her liking it. Shaw had accepted seat and drink without comment and had evidently decided to wait him out on this one. Annie was just sipping her coffee and watching him. He’d forgotten how good his family was at silence. Nathan had been such a novelty in contrast; Harold had found the incessant chatter fascinating and infuriating and, eventually, endearing. Mr. Reese and Ms. Shaw kept the sort of silence that preceded quick and efficient violence. The silence in this living room had a different flavor, but it was also born of long habit and promised danger at its end.

He took a breath and stepped into the fray. “Is Dave here?”

“He’s spending the week at his sister’s,” Annie replied. “She’s up near Dayton.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” she said. “Figured you’d forgotten all about us.”

“It’s only been—”

“Since Thanksgiving back in 1993, was it?” she asked, though it wasn’t really a question. “That was the last time you came home. That’s over twenty years now. So yes, you have changed that much. You had more hair then. And glasses.”

“Ms. Shaw, this is my cousin, Anne—” he stopped.

“You can’t even remember my married name?”

“He’s not sure if he should tell me,” Shaw said. “Cat’s out of the bag, Harold.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” he muttered. “Ms. Shaw, this is my cousin, Anne Olsen. She and her husband David have lived here since I was nineteen. Annie, Ms. Shaw is a colleague of mine. She’s in need of medical attention.”

“What sort of medical attention?” Annie asked sharply. “The nearest clinic’s just in town.”

“I can take care of it myself,” Shaw said. “Long as your first aid kit’s got more than a couple of bandaids and some expired aspirin.”

“You’ve never lived on a working farm, have you? Sit tight for a minute.”

“And, Annie,” Harold said, “unfortunately I haven’t outgrown the glasses, just misplaced them. I don’t know if you remember—”

“You left your spares on the bedside table back in ’93,” Annie replied. “Your dad asked me to mail them to you, but he forgot you never left an address. And then he forgot you’d left home in the first place. But you weren’t around for that part. I never realized an insurance company could keep anyone that busy.” She got up. “Like I said. Sit tight for a minute.”

Harold could feel Ms. Shaw watching him from across the table, but neither of them said a word until Annie returned rather more than a minute later and laid a pair of of heavy wireframe glasses on the table. He picked them up and drew the cuffs of his stolen flannel shirt carefully across the lenses, wiping away two decades’ worth of dust. They settled over his nose and pinched slightly.

He looked at Ms. Shaw, who looked back noncommittally, and then up at Annie, who looked down with tired eyes. “Here’s the kit,” she said.

He reached for it before Shaw could. “Allow me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I have my glasses now,” he pointed out, tapping them for emphasis.

“Of the two of us, which has medical training?” Shaw snapped.

“Of the two of us, which has a bullet graze to the ribs? You’ll make it worse by twisting to reach.”

“I made it worse hauling your frozen ass through the snow.”

His cousin’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. “What sort of insurance company did you say you worked for?”

“Annie,” he said, “I owe you a very long explanation and a very sincere apology, but just at the moment it’s extremely important that we take care of Ms. Shaw’s injuries and catch up on some much-needed sleep. Is there any way we could put off this discussion for a few hours?”

She’d gotten that look from his father’s side of the family, that wry twist of the mouth that would have expressed itself as an eloquent wave of the hand on Nathan Ingram or a minute shrug on John Reese. “Hungry?” she said. That, too, came from his father’s side of the family. Food before arguments, always. “I’ll make sandwiches.”

They had cold turkey and mayonnaise on good whole-grain bread, and between them he and Ms. Shaw had inhaled half a plate by the time she let him near her ribs with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab. The gash was long and ragged, still bleeding sluggishly, but not deep enough to cause any serious damage. He readied the needle and sterile thread.

“I can take care of it,” she said one last time, but it was no more than rote protest.

“Not at this angle,” he replied. “Now hold still.”

“He used to get faint at the sight of blood,” Annie put in, eyeing them with interest. He glared at her, and she took a large bite out of her own sandwich.

“He still does,” Shaw said, and Harold drove the needle into her side. She stiffened but didn’t make a sound. On the other side of the table, Annie watched them over the lip of her mug.

“You can take your old room,” she told Harold when they had finished up. “We keep it made up for guests. Should be comfortable enough. _You_ can have the master.” That was to Shaw, who was pinched and white and likely hadn’t slept for three days running. “Just let me change the sheets. There are fresh towels in the bathroom, if either of you needs a shower.”

He made good use of the shower, then raided the medicine cabinet for a disposable razor and exchanged three days’ worth of stubble for a collection of shallow nicks from his trembling hand. The room at the end of the hall had two narrow windows and a single twin bed, but those were the only respects in which it resembled his childhood bedroom. Even the carpet had changed. He folded his glasses on the bedside table, lay on the narrow mattress, and stared up at a ceiling now painted sage green, waiting for either terror or exhaustion to drag him under.

Neither did. Instead the door swung open, so quietly he wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t thrown a wedge of yellow light across the ceiling. It closed again a moment later.

He cleared his throat. “You should be resting. I told you, we’re safe here.”

“It’s too goddamn quiet.”

“It’s certainly quieter than New York.”

He reached for the switch on the wall and flooded the room with light. She came up to the side of the bed and looked down at him, arms crossed over her chest. Annie had loaned her a change of clothes. She looked as out of place as he felt.

“You’re pretty calm for a guy in hiding from a supercomputer he built,” she said.

“Calm has nothing to do with it. I simply don’t have the capacity for panic just at the moment. Too much has happened—I need time for it to compile.” He sighed. “I’m sure a few hours of sleep will do me a world of good, and then I’ll be capable of falling apart, if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

She was staring at the wall above his head. “What do you think the Machine wants?”

“Until quite recently, Ms. Shaw, I wouldn’t have thought it capable of wanting anything.”

“Do you think it’s dangerous?”

“I’ll remind you that we have nothing but the word of a violent criminal that we have any reason to be hiding from it in the first place.” He studiously avoided the thought that Root had proven herself remarkably reliable when it came to the Machine; more reliable, certainly, than Harold himself.

“Harold. Is it dangerous?”

He sat up and reached for his glasses. She put a hand over his, clenching down hard to stop him. He squinted at her, trying to make out more than dark eyes in a blurred face mere inches away. “You’re afraid,” he said, startled, then wished he could take it back.

“You’re not?”

“Certainly,” he said. “I am immeasurably worried about Mr. Reese, and to be quite honest I have no idea what we are going to do when we leave here, which we should probably do before very long. But, Ms. Shaw, I hadn’t expected you to—”

“I trusted Cole,” she interrupted. “I trusted him, and then he went and got himself killed. I never met his parents. Unless you count surveilling their home, which you shouldn’t.”

He stared at her. “Ms. Shaw, I confess I’m at a loss to know what’s expected of me in this conversation.”

“I didn’t come here to talk,” she said, and then she leaned forward.

Her mouth tasted of the mint toothpaste from his cousin’s bathroom, and her left hand twisted itself in the heavy fabric of his shirt, tugging insistently. At first he let himself be drawn in, tired and pliant and all too willing to accept pleasure where it was offered. It distracted nicely from the lingering soreness of his hip and neck. Then he came back to himself and pulled away.

“Ms. Shaw,” he said, catching a steadying breath. “This is ill-advised.”

“You’re not going to tell me it can see us here.”

Her lips against his had been determined, even aggressive, but oddly not ungentle. “You’ve never given me any indication of interest,” he said slowly, adding this to the list of things he needed to process. “Is this just a reaction to our current circumstances?”

“Does it matter?”

As a rule, he avoided apologizing for his physical shortcomings, but at the moment they were more pronounced than usual. “I’m not at my best today, Ms. Shaw. I may not be able to—appreciate your advances.”

She was still very close; he could feel it when she shrugged. “You’ve got hands.”

“And a very small bed.”

“Harold,” Shaw said, and now she was close enough that she could feel her words, too, as breath against his skin. “Do you want me to go?” He shook his head. “Turn out the light.” And he did.

***

When Harold woke, the sliver of glass above the heavy curtains had turned dark. Ms. Shaw lay between him and the door, and to reach his glasses at the bedside table he’d have to reach across her; he was prevented from doing so by the astonishing realization that she was still asleep, her breaths coming slow and even.

He counted them to a hundred, then two hundred, and might have gone on counting indefinitely if the smell of bacon wafting up from downstairs hadn’t been overpoweringly attractive. He cleared his throat to say her name, but his cough was enough to shock her upright, instantly alert.

“How late is it?” he said instead.

“About six,” she said at once. Evidently she shared Mr. Reese’s uncanny sense of time. “We shouldn’t have slept so long.”

“You needed it.” She didn’t reply, just slid out of bed. He stretched, testing sore muscles, and reached for the light. “I think that’s dinner, downstairs.”

“I could eat.”

She waited for him, though, as he washed up; he came out of the bathroom and found her leaning against the opposite wall. Her eyes flicked toward him, then slid away. He thought he probably ought to say something but couldn’t think what.

Annie met him at the foot of the stairs. She looked at Shaw, then back at Harold, and he nearly told her she had the wrong idea before realizing it was, in fact, exactly the right one.

She didn’t give him much time to consider that. “You should have told me you were waiting for someone, Harold,” she said instead. “Come and give me a hand with the food. I wasn’t planning to cook for four.”

Harold’s heart gave a great beat of hope, and he strode forward as quickly as he could, Ms. Shaw right at his heels. “Mr. Reese?” he called, but the person sitting at the card table in the living room was certainly not John.

Her hands were folded around one of his father’s old mugs, and she wore a thick wool sweater and a sweet smile that made her look right at home. “If it isn’t my two favorite people in the world,” Root said. “Go on and help your cousin in the kitchen, Harold. We can catch up after dinner. We have so much to do.”


End file.
